For the primary time because the Eisenhower Administration, ladies dreaming of enjoying baseball professionally in the USA can have the chance to see that dream realized with a league of their very own.
Final October, the Girls’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL) issued its first press launch to announce the founding of the nation’s solely skilled ladies’s baseball league, which is ready to launch in the summertime of 2026. The league is co-founded by Justine Siegal — who’s greatest recognized for founding Baseball For All, “[A] ladies baseball nonprofit that builds gender fairness by creating alternatives for ladies to play, coach, and lead within the sport” — and Keith Stein, a businessman, lawyer, and member of the possession group for a semiprofessional males’s baseball workforce in Toronto. The league has additionally introduced in former Toronto Blue Jays supervisor Cito Gaston and Group Japan’s two-time Girls’s Baseball World Cup MVP Ayami Sato as particular advisors.
Girls’s baseball has an extended, however sadly sparse, historical past relationship again to the late 1800s, when schools within the Northeast, comparable to Vassar, fielded groups. Since then, ladies have largely accrued enjoying time by representing their nation’s nationwide workforce on the Olympics, enjoying on barnstorming groups – from the Dolly Vardens within the 1870s to the Colorado Silver Bullets within the Nineties – or by incomes roles in leagues primarily created for males, from the newbie ranks to the professionals (see Mo’ne Davis, Toni Stone, Lizzie Arlington, and extra lately, Kelsie Whitmore, amongst many others). Apart from the All-American Women Skilled Baseball League, shaped throughout WWII to fill a void left by the male ballplayers combating abroad, ladies in the USA haven’t had a devoted skilled league.
So in spite of everything these years with no league, why now? “The previous was the fitting time,” Stein says in a current interview with FanGraphs. “Thirty years in the past was the fitting time. 4 years in the past was the fitting time. Positively, undoubtedly, now’s the fitting time.” As proof, he notes, “There’s now an expert ladies’s hockey league that’s thriving, an expert ladies’s soccer league, an expert ladies’s basketball league. They’re all thriving due to the urge for food, the unbelievable urge for food, for ladies’s sport.”
However whereas the tradition does appear primed to welcome extra ladies’s leagues, an enthusiastic fan base solely covers half of the demand equation. In contrast to the opposite sports activities that Stein cites, ladies’s baseball doesn’t profit from the existence of faculty packages to behave as a developmental pipeline. Stein says the creation of a league might be a “catalyst for the event of an entire infrastructure round ladies’s baseball and hopefully spawn the event of a baseball tradition in America for ladies.” And within the meantime, he believes there’s greater than sufficient expertise to fill the WPBL rosters. Almost 700 gamers registered within the first week or so after the league’s announcement, in response to Stein. “We now have nice skilled gamers from all over the world, prime gamers from Japan, the U.S. — all over the place — who’re very excited to play with us,” Stein says. “There are over 2,000 ladies enjoying on boys highschool groups. There are 1000’s and 1000’s of gamers who’re able to play on this league.”
Gamers and followers can solely get an upstart ladies’s league to this point, although; it wants a monetary assist system to assist it get off the bottom. A method to do this could be for the ladies’s league to type a partnership with its male counterpart, because the WNBA did with the NBA. Nonetheless, for the WPBL, partnering with MLB would imply giving males’s baseball a say in how the ladies’s league operates. Maybe cautious of this, the WPBL as an alternative is selecting to stay impartial and create a female-led league. To that finish, the league has composed an advisory board of seven ladies with a long time of expertise in baseball and ladies’s sports activities. Maybelle Blair, a former pitcher for the All-American Women Skilled Baseball League, will function the board’s Honorary Chair and throw out the primary pitch on the WPBL’s season opener in 2026.
The WPBL plans to carry a scouting camp this coming spring, adopted by a participant draft late in 2025, main as much as its first season in the course of the summer time of 2026. The league’s six inaugural groups might be situated within the northeastern area of the U.S. to begin, with plans to broaden nationwide because the league grows. Given its bold goals, the challenges of beginning a model new league, and the friction created by a sports activities tradition that’s nonetheless studying to correctly worth athletes who aren’t males, the WPBL faces a formidable path ahead. Thankfully, trailblazers throughout ladies’s sports activities have mapped a course. The current explosion of eyeballs on ladies’s basketball units up the WNBA as an apparent mannequin for a ladies’s baseball league, however the WNBA stands on the shoulders of earlier makes an attempt at ladies’s skilled basketball.
Many keep in mind the American Basketball League that began one yr previous to the WNBA, and lasted simply three seasons, however nearly twenty years prior, the Girls’s Skilled Basketball League (WBL) gave American basketball followers their first style of ladies’s professional ball. Although the league drew 1000’s of followers when it tipped off, it folded after three years. The WBL demonstrated {that a} ladies’s skilled league might work, nevertheless it nonetheless relied on correct execution off the court docket. Although ladies’s sports activities are producing “unbelievable curiosity and assist,” as Stein notes within the press launch, there’s lots the WPBL can be taught from the missteps of the WBL in three important areas – workforce possession, the on-field product, and media protection.
Group Possession
The WBL’s league president Invoice Byrne was, like Stein, a sports activities entrepreneur who dabbled in a number of burgeoning leagues throughout soccer, basketball, and softball. Because the league’s president and commissioner, he oversaw a gaggle of homeowners that finally lacked dedication. A sports activities league, like all new enterprise endeavor, is prone to spend a number of years within the purple earlier than turning a revenue. Karen Logan, a participant and coach for the Chicago Hustle who additionally labored for the league as an advisor and promoter, instructed the Washington Put up, “The workforce house owners are taking a look at this league as a advertising motion, a fad to money in on,” she mentioned. “They do not know what they need the product to be.”
Gail Marquis, who performed two seasons within the WBL, echoed Logan’s sentiment in an interview with The Subsequent: “The house owners, the organizers, they had been simply in it for the cash they usually didn’t have the longevity to go together with it the entire time.” Marquis received a WBL title with the New York Stars after which watched the franchise fold in the course of the subsequent offseason. When a championship caliber workforce didn’t instantly flip a revenue, possession bailed. Regardless of its success on the court docket, the workforce’s swift demise was not stunning. The Stars started the season enjoying dwelling video games at Madison Sq. Backyard and training at Lengthy Island College, however Marquis recalled that half method by the season, they had been enjoying video games at native schools and training at rec facilities in sketchy neighborhoods. And if that wasn’t sufficient, participant paychecks started arriving at inconsistent intervals, if in any respect.
As groups folded, generally midseason, it solid a damaging notion on the league and ladies’s sports activities extra usually. Marquis mentioned the media would use it as proof that ladies’s sports activities weren’t sustainable. In actuality, the league’s buyers didn’t give it the chance to achieve the purpose of sustainability.
WBL house owners paid a price of $50,000 to hitch the league (about $235,000 in the present day), that means they didn’t must be billionaires, and even hundred millionaires, to purchase a sports activities franchise, as is the case in the present day. The newest WNBA enlargement groups have paid charges of $50 million, with further monetary commitments required to construct state-of-the-art apply amenities, bringing the buy-in determine north of $100 million. Elevating the barrier to entry will increase the chance that potential possession teams will view groups as investments and the league as a spot the place sure minimal high quality requirements have to be met.
Stein appears to grasp the must be considered in vetting possession teams. “[It’s] the factor we’re going to labor and agonize over probably the most,” he says, including that they’ve already had near 100 possession inquiries. “Everyone desires to personal an expert sports activities workforce. And from my expertise, most individuals shouldn’t personal an expert sports activities workforce,” he says. “They may have the cash, however they don’t have the fitting mindset.” Stein is searching for house owners “ who’re enthusiastic about constructing out this league over the lengthy haul, not the brief time period.” He floats a timeline of three to 5 years earlier than the league breaks even, that means house owners might want to put together themselves to soak up losses within the early going.
On the subject of amenities, Stein acknowledges that the league’s stadiums initially might be on the smaller finish to make sure full, energetic crowds and an optimum broadcast product. However no matter measurement, Stein expects groups “to have the fitting coaching amenities, clubhouses, dugouts, area, area circumstances. We’re not going to take care of an possession group that doesn’t have a facility dedication in place that isn’t absolutely skilled with the entire requisite facilities.”
Too many WBL house owners had been seeking to money in on an in a single day success whereas working a bare-bones operation. On draft day, mere months earlier than the league was set to tip off, two groups had been nonetheless with out dwelling arenas, and workforce house owners had been unilaterally making picks as a result of they hadn’t employed scouts or coaches. Then, when the time got here to barter contracts with the brand new draftees – a lot of whom had to learn that the league really existed – gamers bristled on the low salaries. Luisa Harris (who was additionally drafted into the NBA) was one yr faraway from school and dealing an administrative job at Delta State College when she was drafted by the Houston WBL workforce. Upon listening to rumors of low four-figure salaries, Harris instructed the New York Occasions, “I do know the ladies received’t play for nothing. I make that [much] sitting [at a desk],” whereas noting that enjoying basketball requires way more effort and talent than a desk job.
When WBL house owners didn’t land within the black after one or two seasons, groups discovered themselves too far within the gap to dig their method out. Throughout the league’s third and closing season, gamers had been strolling out of video games in protest as a consequence of lack of pay. Possession teams underestimated or misunderstood the price of proudly owning a sports activities franchise, maybe assuming they might pad their revenue margins by exploiting the labor of ladies – one of many basic cheat codes for these in positions of energy.
Stein admits that WPBL salaries received’t be excessive at first, however he says the plan is to have salaries develop because the league does. “It’s a key aim for us to raise the [compensation] for ladies baseball gamers, as a result of at first they’re not going to make something near what skilled basketball or soccer gamers are making proper? However our hope is we get them there.” By his estimation it’s going to take a number of years to achieve that time. Within the meantime, to make up for the inadequate salaries, “We’ll increase the bar by doing issues like [covering] lodging prices and meals prices,” he says. “We might be making this as enticing financially as we will.”
Whereas this plan is admirable and may very well be trigger for cautious optimism, it’s additionally unlikely to be administration’s determination alone to make. In {most professional} sports activities leagues, salaries usually are not unilaterally decreed by administration, however relatively negotiated by a gamers union. Marquis bemoaned the dearth of a union within the WBL, wishing the gamers had been higher geared up to battle again in opposition to the house owners. And although Stein appears poised to argue the monetary realities of a league that’s simply getting began, he needs to be ready to take action earlier than a united entrance of gamers who know their price.
To return to Karen Logan’s ideas on the financials of a brand new league, “If a league can’t pay first rate wages, it shouldn’t exist.”
The On-Discipline Product
Every part the league does ought to showcase the precise baseball being performed. This could go with out saying, however as a result of many individuals nonetheless view ladies’s sports activities as lesser, those that are charged with promoting the product could also be tempted to decorate it up with varied gimmicks to draw extra eyeballs. A number of the WBL gimmicks concerned literal costume up. The Dallas workforce introduced in a stylist for a marathon makeover session previous to opening evening. Different groups spent draft picks on publicity stunts. The New York Stars drafted a former Miss America, who on the time was busy working as an NFL broadcaster for CBS. The Iowa Cornets chosen a participant from the Soviet Union’s nationwide workforce, seemingly for the only real motive that she was 7’4”. Some argue all publicity is sweet publicity, however lookie-loos don’t make for invested followers, and artifice tends to distract relatively than improve.
In the meantime, gamers needs to be allowed to give attention to their craft relatively than crafting the specified public persona. We’ve come a great distance because the All-American Women Skilled Baseball League had its gamers on the sphere in skirts, however feminine athletes are nonetheless below stress to current a passable picture to the general public, regardless that the general public hardly ever agrees on what that picture needs to be.
As one of many faces of the WBL, Molly Kazmer (who on the time glided by Molly Bolin) bore the burden of conflicting expectations. Many individuals thought that elite feminine athletes ought to give off stereotypical tomboy vibes, whereas Kazmer supplied a extra standard femininity. Then, when she went in opposition to the norms established by male athletes and offered posters of herself that seemed extra like they belonged in a vogue journal than Sports activities Illustrated, she got here below fireplace from feminists for permitting herself to be exploited. It didn’t matter that the poster was her concept, and that she was the one immediately gathering income from the gross sales; to her critics, she was utilizing her femininity for monetary achieve. Later, the truth that she pursued a profession in any respect relatively than being a stay-at-home spouse and mom was used in opposition to her in court docket when combating for custody of her son.
Although a lot of what Kazmer and her friends endured has been rightly excised from society, professional athletes nonetheless face hordes of harsh critics and stress to dwell as much as stereotypes, nevertheless it’s essential that none of that comes from league or workforce officers. A wholesome league empowers its gamers to be themselves and discourages pointless exterior commentary as a result of creating that surroundings will permit gamers to carry out at their peak. And high-quality baseball is the precise product.
However once more, as a result of some view the ladies’s model of sport as lesser, they consider that gives a built-in excuse to take a position much less. Of their eyes, merely offering a league for ladies is a beneficiant act of charity, one that doesn’t lengthen to executing the fundamental operations of a league in a reliable method. For its half, the WBL cheaped out on officiating. It’s arduous to play a decent sport of basketball with rec league-quality refs. Throughout one explicit sport, the referees had been so egregious that 5 gamers from the New Orleans Satisfaction fouled out with 5 minutes remaining within the fourth quarter, leaving solely 4 wholesome gamers to complete the sport. Reasonably than play shorthanded, the workforce agreed to stroll out in protest of the substandard officiating.
Many WBL groups additional selected to compromise the product on the court docket by hiring coaches based mostly extra on identify recognition than precise {qualifications}, preferring former NBA gamers and coaches to candidates skilled within the ladies’s sport. Because of this, the league wound up with males who considered the teaching alternative as a stepping stone for a greater place on the boys’s aspect, in addition to coaches who had already confirmed themselves missing within the NBA — after which did no higher within the WBL. A number of coaches needed to be changed midseason for underperformance or racking up so many technicals that the workforce couldn’t afford the fines. Within the aftermath, the gamers had been left to wash up the messes for males who in all probability shouldn’t have had the job within the first place. Right here WPBL groups will do effectively to lean on Siegal and Sato and their networks inside the sport as they go about their hiring, relatively than making an attempt to poach huge names from MLB.
And although Stein is already priming the narrative that budgets might be tight early on, he understands that placing out a compelling on-field product is paramount. “What we’re doing is essential by way of elevating ladies’s sport and ladies’s baseball, however we need to be a kickass league,” he says. “We wish folks to look at us, not simply because it’s ladies; we wish folks to look at it as a result of it’s thrilling, it’s nice competitors, [and] there’s nice expertise.”
Media Protection
The media panorama within the late Nineteen Seventies was clearly very totally different from what it’s in the present day. The place the WBL struggled with restricted avenues for getting its product in entrance of followers, the WPBL can have the other drawback: At the moment’s leisure market is oversaturated. The abundance of choices is overwhelming, making it harder than ever to chop by the noise and entice followers to a brand new league.
Because the WBL tried to get off the bottom, these inside the league understood that the important thing to profitable over potential followers was getting them to a sport. Even these skeptical of ladies’s sports activities or agnostic to the trigger may very well be transformed by the motion on the court docket. Ray Scott, who coached the Dallas Diamonds and New Orleans Satisfaction, mentioned he and his spouse Sandi made a degree to get as many individuals as attainable to return to video games, and Sandi famous that the expertise obtained rave opinions. “One remark that was nearly common,” she mentioned, “was that individuals had no concept how effectively the ladies performed and the way fascinating the sport was.”
Folks received’t know what they’re lacking if they will’t watch the video games. The WBL’s attendance was robust early on, when the brand new league had loads of buzz, however the groups’ dwelling arenas held solely round 5,000 followers – just like the ballparks the WPBL can have beginning out. Not many WBL video games made it on TV given the restricted air time accessible again then, so sustaining that early buzz was difficult.
A examine from the expertise company Wasserman estimated that 15% of sports activities media protection from 2018 to 2023 went to ladies’s sports activities. That quantity represents a broad definition of media, together with streaming websites and social media accounts. When zooming in on extra mainstream TV protection like studio discuss reveals, ladies’s sports activities garner simply 5% of the protection. Although the examine reveals year-over-year development for ladies’s sports activities, the discrepancy between the place that protection comes from underscores the purpose that a rise in amount doesn’t assure elevated accessibility. Final season, WNBA video games airing on ESPN averaged 1.19 million viewers, whereas video games airing on ION, a lesser-known cable channel, averaged simply 670,000 viewers. One of the simplest ways for a brand new league to achieve potential followers is thru high quality, mainstream protection.
Sadly, securing a serious rights settlement with one of many marquee networks might not be an possibility for a newly shaped ladies’s baseball league. Understanding this, the following best choice for the WPBL could also be to make its video games accessible on an simply accessible streaming service for no price.
At the moment, the WPBL is within the early phases of broadcast negotiations, and Stein is assured video games might be nationally distributed, however particulars have but to be labored out. Watching video games needs to be neither difficult nor price prohibitive, and the WPBL must prioritize accessibility because it strikes ahead with negotiations. If the method for watching video games leads some sports activities weblog to publish a “Learn how to Watch the WPBL” information daily, then somebody tousled. Let the NFL put video games on Amazon Prime and Netflix, and let MLB hand two video games per week to Apple TV+. These are established leagues with fanbases that may go the additional mile to determine it out. Would-be followers shouldn’t should obtain an obscure app or pay additional subscription charges, and whereas free trials are nice for streaming providers with a bunch of flicks and/or TV reveals, they wouldn’t work effectively for a brand new league as a result of they don’t final lengthy sufficient for folks to develop their fandom. The WPBL must make it as simple as attainable for followers to return again for extra, day after day. Positive, giving any product away without spending a dime shouldn’t be the easiest way to show a fast revenue, nevertheless it may very well be one of the best path towards sustainability; it additionally doesn’t should be a everlasting mannequin. As soon as followers are invested and keen to pay to look at video games, the league can discover the whole media panorama and work out a extra sturdy broadcast rights settlement.
The WPBL may take into account the instance set by the Skilled Girls’s Hockey League, which performed its debut season final winter. The PWHL streamed video games without spending a dime on YouTube within the U.S. and broadcasted them on a number of regional sports activities networks in Canada. Did this generate a bunch of income for the league? I don’t know. But it surely made it tremendous simple for anybody curious in regards to the league to open up an app they’re already accustomed to and activate a sport at no further price. All of them however eliminated the barrier to entry. The league’s inaugural season opener drew 130,000 viewers on YouTube and a couple of.9 million viewers throughout the networks in Canada. By season’s finish, the PWHL’s YouTube channel had over 100,000 subscribers and generated over 40 million views.
And the followers who tuned in loved a well-produced broadcast with high quality play-by-play and commentary. In a number of years, if the PWHL does signal a bigger media rights deal, these followers will in all probability be extra keen to comply with the league to a selected streaming service and pay a couple of bucks additional to look at it.
The WPBL additionally wants to grasp that whereas many sports activities media retailers are increasing their scope to incorporate extra ladies’s sports activities, it shouldn’t depend on exterior protection to maintain followers within the know, spark curiosity, or present primers for curious of us desirous to be taught extra. Simply as MLB employs its personal beat writers to cowl every workforce, prospect analysts to offer updates on soon-to-be stars, and Mike Petriellos to indicate off the kinds of analyses unlocked by Statcast knowledge, the WPBL needs to be ready to make stats accessible and serve up storytelling round its personal groups and gamers, and permit followers as many alternatives as attainable to see and respect its elite athletes.
In keeping with Stein, the league has already begun making strikes to provoke supplemental protection of the league. “There might be a docuseries referring to this league on one of many streamers,” he says, including that roughly a dozen manufacturing corporations have reached out, and several other of these discussions have led to formal presents to provide a sequence.
‘This Is Historic’
The WPBL has the possibility to be a gamechanger for ladies’s baseball. Fifty years from now, the league may very well be getting ready to rejoice a half century of existence, having develop into the vacation spot for gamers all over the world to return play in opposition to one of the best of one of the best. However to get there, it’s going to take persistence and “tens of millions and tens of millions and tens of millions of {dollars},” as Billie Jean King mentioned in a current podcast interview with Sarah Spain, the place she described the method she has undertaken alongside Mark Walter (a member of the Guggenheim Group that owns the Dodgers) in serving to to launch the PWHL. King is intimately accustomed to the social dynamics that problem ladies’s sports activities, however she maintains that partnering with Walter is the important thing to the PWHL’s future success as a result of “You want somebody who believes within the funding, and he believes that he’ll get a return on his funding.”
It’s not simply in regards to the funding. It’s the idea behind the funding. Gamers, coaches, and everybody concerned might be uneasy at first. Beginning a brand new league is a terrifying proposition. Brenda Pitts was skeptical when she began listening to rumors in regards to the WBL, and after graduating from the College of Alabama, her subsequent skilled transfer was securing a job as a instructor. However regardless of the uncertainty of becoming a member of the WBL, she felt she needed to take the leap. “That is historic, and I simply have to go do it. Even when it fails, I simply have to go do it.”
Everybody concerned within the WPBL is taking a leap of religion. The league and workforce house owners can ease the fears of the gamers and employees by demonstrating unflinching confidence of their funding and committing to experience it out, particularly by the lean years. And by specializing in guaranteeing the best high quality play on the sphere and making it simple for followers to immerse themselves within the sport, that 50-year milestone is achievable. Even when it fails, this league will make historical past and develop into a part of the inspiration for some future league that doesn’t fail, because the WBL was for the WNBA — although the WPBL desires to be a lot greater than a blueprint for the following iteration of a ladies’s baseball league. Thankfully, if Stein, Siegal, and their powerhouse advisory board get the right funding from possession, showcase the product on the sphere, and put the sport in entrance of as many potential followers as attainable, there is no such thing as a motive why the WPBL can’t succeed.
